The swine flu vaccine Pandemrix has a direct link to causing narcolepsy, especially among the younger people who were vaccinated, a new Swedish study revealed on Tuesday.

The Swedish Medical Products Agency (Läkemedelsverket) ordered the massive study to determine if the vaccine had any connection to narcolepsy after dozens of reported cases of young people coming down with the affliction after receiving a swine flu jab.

The study, which took place between October 2009 and the December 2011, compared 3.3 million vaccinated Swedes with 2.5 million who were not vaccinated.

"We can see that over the whole study period we have 126 cases of those vaccinated getting narcolepsy," Ingemar Person, professor behind the study, said in a statement on Tuesday.

"There were 20 cases among those not vaccinated. We're talking about a threefold increase in risk."

The risk was found to be highest among the youngest people who took the vaccines. For those under the age of 21, the risk of contracting narcolepsy was three times higher for those who were vaccinated with Pandemrix, whereas those aged between 21 and 30 had double the risk.

Those vaccinated over the age of 40 had the same risk as those who didn't, according to the study.

Person added that it was "very difficult" to determine whether there was any connection with other sicknesses or diseases from taking the vaccine.

According to new data released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 19.7 million new venereal infections in the United States in 2008, bringing the total number of existing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the U.S. at that time to 110,197,000!

The 19.7 million new STIs in 2008 vastly outpaced the new jobs and college graduates created in the United States that year or any other year on record, according to government data. The competition was not close.

The STI study referenced by the CDC estimated that 50 percent of the new infections in 2008 occurred among people in the 15-to-24 age bracket. In fact, of the 19,738,800 total new STIs in the United States in 2008, 9,782,650 were among Americans in the 15-to-24 age bracket.

By contrast, there were 1,524,092 bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in the 2007-2008 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means the total number of new STIs in 2008 outpaced the total number of new bachelor’s degrees by nearly 13 to 1, and the number of new STIs among Americans in the 15-to-24 age bracket outnumbered new bachelor’s degrees by more than 6 to 1.

While the CDC estimates that there were 19.7 million new STIs in the United States in 2008, data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the total number of people employed in the country actually declined by 2.9 million during that year.

The CDC said the new venereal infections contracted each year cost the nation about $16 billion.

“CDC’s new estimates show that there are about 20 million new infections in the United States each year, costing the American healthcare system nearly $16 billion in direct medical costs alone,” said a CDC fact sheet.

A 47-year-old Detroit woman is recovering after an extreme addiction to tea.

Henry Ford Hospital Bone & Mineral Research Head Sudhaker Rao says the patient drank the equivalent of 100 cups of tea a day for 17 years.  He says she lost all her teeth and doctors at first thought she had cancer, but as it turned out,  she was suffering from a fluoride overdose.

“Among the beverages that contain fluoride, tea actually contains the highest amount of fluoride, however, it is a small quantity in each bag so we don’t drink that many. So if you overflow your system … the kidney is unable to excrete this load of fluoride from this many bags of tea,” said Rao.

“I should give due credit to her – she actually tried very hard and gave up tea and within a few months she started noticing signifacant improvment to her symptoms. However, the good thing is her bones are very strong, she will probably never break them,” he added.

Dr. Rao says the patient is doing much better — but she still has a high bone density– that leaves her bones heavy and sore.  He says she is now hooked on another beverage: Diet Coke.

How does tea come to have fluoride in it? The tea leaves absorb the fluoride through the soil.

Men who take vitamin C supplements are at higher-than-average risk of developing kidney stones, according to a Swedish study of more than 22,000 men.

"It has long been suspected that high doses of vitamin C may increase the risk of kidney stones as some of the vitamin C absorbed by the body is excreted in urine as oxalate, one of the key components of kidney stones," said lead researcher Laura Thomas at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

Thomas and her team, whose findings appeared in JAMA Internal medicine, used data from a large study of middle-aged and elderly Swedish men who answered a series of questions on their diet and lifestyle, then were tracked for an average of 11 years.

The current analysis included 907 men who said they took regular vitamin C tablets and more than 22,000 who didn't use any nutritional supplements.

Of the vitamin C users, 3.4 percent developed kidney stones for the first time during the study, compared to 1.8 percent of non-supplement users. Men who took vitamin C supplements at least once a day had the highest risk of kidney stones.

Stones are made up of tiny crystals, which can be formed by calcium combining with oxalate. They usually pass on their own, but can cause severe pain in the process, though larger stones occasionally require surgery.

The findings don't prove that the vitamin itself triggers stones to form. But researchers said that because there are no clear benefits tied to taking high-dose vitamin C, people who have had stones in the past might want to think before taking extra supplements.

Men are more likely to develop stones than women.

The findings don't mean people shouldn't get plenty of vitamin C through fruits and vegetables, since the antioxidant is important for bone and muscle health - and severe deficiency can cause scurvy.

"Vitamin C is an important part of a healthy diet," Thomas said. "Any effect of vitamin C on kidney stone risk is likely to depend both on the dose and on the combination of nutrients with which it is ingested.

Swedish supplements, like those the study participants would have taken, typically contain about 1,000 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C per tablet. Most vitamin C supplements sold in the U.S. contain either 500 or 1,000 mg.

Brian Matlaga, a urologist who studies kidney stones at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, said that more research is needed to determine for certain whether reasonable doses of vitamin C may increase the kidney stone risk.

For now, people who haven't had kidney stones before shouldn't worry about related risks tied to the vitamin.